Demo code provided with many thanks to Business Tycoon.
Mall Together is a simulation game where you run a whole bunch of stores and the mall that holds them. You need to keep everything stocked, check inventory, hire employees, restock the bathrooms, pack online orders, and manage new items.
The Gameplay of Mall Together
Mall Together is, like many simulation games, a facsimile of running your own store. You start by opening your first store (I chose a bakery). You can ring up your customers’ purchases after filling up your shelves with delicious treats. As you level up, you can add new stores to your mall in empty slots, hire employees to take care of ringing up customers, add other money makers like vending machines, put together online orders, and refill the bathrooms with toilet paper and soap.
If you want people to keep coming and be happy with your mall, you will need to keep up with inventory, keep things stocked, and things like that. As your level rises, you can sign new contracts to add new types of inventory to your shops, like adding donuts and breads to my bakery. After a few more levels, I unlocked massage chairs that charge $10 per sitting.
At the end of the day, you count your earnings and start a new one. You usually get about two online orders a day, at least at the beginning, so you have a couple of things to do every day.
The Pros of Mall Together
Mall Together is a lot of fun. You get to pick your stores and name them, hire people, fire them, move items around, and zoom around on a scooter thing inside the mall. I really enjoy the management side of everything; keeping tabs on the bathroom, the inventories, and making new stores is great. Moving items around is super easy, and changing pricing for things is also.
Zooming from one store to another is also fun; I am so glad the developer added an electric scooter. You can choose to hold, or toggle sprint with the scooter, and that is always a wonderful accessibility feature. All the buttons can be remapped to others, you can invert the axes, and there are lots of volume and resolution settings too. The game looks great at all the resolution settings too, surprisingly.
The number one thing I love about Mall Together is that you can play with others if you want. Since no one else that I know had a key to the demo, I couldn’t try it out, but it looks like it could be a lot of fun to play with friends.
The Cons of Mall Together
While I had a lot of fun playing Mall Together, there were a couple of issues I had. I never expect demos to be perfect, of course, and I expect a lot of these issues will be fixed before release. So I’m going to list off all the issues I had.
The music is super annoying; I ended up just turning it off entirely. There are like ten one-minute songs, and they got old fast.
Also, there was a bug that when an item is out of stock, sometimes the stock employee will pick up the toilet paper or soap to refill the item instead, turning them into that thing they need to refill. The number of times the stocker of my bakery turned soap into cookies was astounding.
While you can update the cost of items in your stores, you can’t change the prices of things in vending machines or massage chair costs. It’s probably just the demo, which limits you to two stores, but there was not much to do. I get to fill like two online orders a day, scoot around, and order occasional inventory. The employees take care of the rest. I feel like if I had ten stores, though, there would be a lot to do.
Futhermore, you don’t unlock contracts for new items very fast. This again feels like something that will change when there are more stores to unlock.
There was another weird glitch where customers would refuse to line up for a moment, then get angry that there wasn’t an available register, even when there was no one in line. It only happened in my bakery, so I moved my furniture around, but that didn’t fix it.
Final Thoughts
Overall, the Mall Together demo is great. I had a lot of fun, and I look forward to the full game being released. I think with more stores and being able to play with my friends, Mall Together is looking like an exciting release. I could tell the devs spent a lot of time making sure the demo was as bug-free as possible. What I could see of it felt finished, and I am looking forward to more.
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